Saturday, February 13, 2010

"You're in the UNION..now"

Sit back in your chair, take a sip of that coffee and now I want you to visualize the words…day care center. OK…have you done it?

Did the headquarters of Exxon or General Electric come to mind? I thought not. I’d bet you got the mental image of either a store front facility or someone’s home. Playground toys, perhaps a small bus or two, but nothing fancy. Now you have to ask yourself what kind of people actually make a living running these places. Are they corporate giants with the business acumen of a General Motors (oops, my bad …that wasn’t a good example) so lets say…Southwest Airlines or Google, they seem to be doing ok in these times or are day care centers smaller operations with people who like kids?

I suspect you opted for the latter choice. Yep, that’s what we see in the majority of day care operations scattered from Maine to California and all parts in between. Do you think these people make big money? I think they probably do OK but they aren’t going to be reporting earning in the millions or billions. If they are, please let me know, I like kids.

So, the ones I’ve seen during my lifetime are smaller operation with a few employees working in some leased facility or out of their homes. They aren’t exposed to toxic materials (diapers aren’t toxic, just nasty) or to safety hazards (I suppose getting bit could be a safety hazard) so why do they need a union? You’re probably asking yourself the same question, so let me explain.

In Michigan the 40,000 or so day care centers have now been unionized by the AFSCME. This group is a merger of the government workers union and the United Auto Workers. I guess the UAW couldn’t get enough dues revenue from auto workers so they need to dig in the purses of baby sitting nannies. They should be proud.

Check out this link for the story:

http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/11/forced-unionization/

The union managed to get their hooks into this industry by mailing out votes to those in the business. Only 6,000 were mailed back but that was enough to carry the day and now the other 34,000 mom and pop enterprises find themselves obligated to deal with local presidents, local union rules and send in those dues each and every month. Will this cost them more money? You bet it will. Will the day care owners pass the costs onto their customer base? You bet they will.

Will the mother who has a low paying job and has her kid or kids in day care find herself having to put out more bucks? What do you think? Who gets hurt? Well, not the union. Probably not the day care, since they have fixed costs they have to deal with to keep their places open and running.

No, it’ll be that mother. She’ll have to make that decision to find someplace cheaper to leave her kids or do without something she needs at the time. And what do the day care operations get in return for the dues they pay? More governmental interference, more rules, more regulations and you can bet …more paperwork.

Of course the union rebuts the argument by explaining that their dues are paid from the state subsidies and not by the day care centers themselves. Of course the fact that the monies paid to the unions are monies that used to go to the day care operations.

This is the same state where a mother who was watching out for some kids waiting for a school bus and belonging to her neighbor was charged with running a day care center and required to have a license. This poor woman was looking after some kids whose parents had to go to work early and in most places would have been thought as a great neighborhood asset. Not in Michigan, they said since she was looking after some kids for more than two hours a week, she needed a day care license. Fortunately, common sense kicked in and the state agency dropped their claim.

The Obama administration is determined to stuff the unions down our throats, as if we weren’t already choking on his other policies and decisions. The unions threw their support to his election and now we’re starting to see who gets paid back first. It certainly isn’t the voters. I wonder how many of those 34,000 day care center owners voted for some change in the 2008 election? Looks like they’ll be getting their share.